> That would require twice the number of pins
Fair, I'll admit I wrote this after a very long work day and forgot to refresh myself on what a DIMM's pinout was actually like.
That said, Maybe instead of a DIMM it would be better to switch to a PGA or even LGA?
> and traces on each DIMM
Well, Traces are a problem regardless, at the same time it seems that Apple has managed to solve the problem by going to surface mounted chips. That said maybe(?) something like a PGA or LGA would allow for traces to be more clustered in making it a little easier to handle trace length differences...
> I don't think the tradeoffs are worth it to increase system memory bandwidth on consumer systems.
Well, I'd assume that for consumer systems you'd just have one 'channel', since at that point it's 128 bit and the equivalent of dual channel DDR5.
> CPU packages are strained as it is
Apple has managed to provide some fairly wide options in the M series though, so what are they doing that the others are not (aside from that they are effectively using more but smaller channels)?
> Apple has managed to provide some fairly wide options in the M series though, so what are they doing that the others are not (aside from that they are effectively using more but smaller channels)?
They aren't using sockets. They are soldering it directly to the board. I figure that consumers aren't going to a buy a motherboard with a CPU and RAM soldered onto it. I could be wrong about that, but I wouldn't buy it.
They are also much more expensive. It's not that it can't be done since it is done with servers already -- it is that it can't be done for the price consumers want.